Regression
Ave!
In the brightest room of this small double-brick Italian villa, overlooking the vast primordial jungle of the yoga centre next door (the subtle fragrance of jasmine is hinted by orange flower, a flowing blue-green pond and sweeping palms that direct the morning air and the old passage I would follow to school), I wait patiently for the moment when my mind is finally alive. This is not to say that it has always been switched off or that there is some elaborate mechanism required in enabling its esoteric power; a live mind is one that is aware of life as being a real-time strategy computer game, imbued with the world’s exhaustless supply of creative energy. Only in this inspired state of being am I able to consciously decode the reasons for my regression.
History it seems has thrust its great pendulum into the tireless cogs of change, for in some wild paradoxical farce, I have moved into the future and surpassed many tribulations, only to return to the same home that I spent my adolescence. Marcus and I walk this parallel path of moving into a house that is not like our original but soon to bear new pinnacles of movement. Now, with plenteous time proceeding the final year examinations, the anxiety for self-actualisation hath never been greater.
Having ravenously consumed a large bowl of museli and slept an uncomfortable dream about my old high school, drifting aimlessly about and wondering why there are ‘restrictions’, I am not as content as I would have imagined. My high school dream is fragmented at best, but involves traversing the campus (see, I’m already stuck using University terminology!) in search of my classroom, often known by recognising a few acquaintances. As you would probably expect, I am not able to find them and so I continue to walk, passing the ancient fig tree whose overgrown roots burst open the asphalt earth and find myself in the school changerooms.
A ground level chamber of cemented walls and posters of red, blue and gaudy green instigating mental and physical health, a rampant stench of pine deodorant that never did fade in time, large rusted metal doors that bolted the earth to the heavens, and the accompanying insecurities about sex and sexuality that no physical education class could ever be without. In a non-co-education school solely for boys, there were females darted amongst the male members, discussing the issues of teenage life while nonchalantly changing. Outside, a student orchestra of brass and woodwind pull a crowd of curious parents and role model ‘prefect’ students truanted class to run home.
While I could argue the Freudian interpretation of such a dream, it would fall short of the feelings beforehand that might have piqued such a reaction. The results for New South Wales were released earlier this morning to many anxiously awaiting students, determined to get into their course at university while still profoundly aware that only a handful would make it. I remember myself in this position at the same time last year, so eager to make my way into psychology but in the uproar of my heart, knowing that I could never achieve the results I wanted. This was the reality to face.
Now, having painstakingly illuminated a workaround path that has drained me mentally and oftentimes spiritually during the year, it would seem that the less preferred path is actually the more fulfilling one.
In so such instance of my life have I ever had to think deeply about what it means to have responsibility, to take action in the present moment and to learn about secondary outcomes to otherwise mainstream rules.
Many have described history and life as intertwined and cyclical, and I agree with this to a point. We dream about our past and wish for things we could have changed, but we are still made to grow in the here and now. Unless you’re a carrot or a potato, you don’t grow underground and so it would make sense we don’t force ourselves to believe we are slaves to our past selves.
And I daresay that any school-results receiver who doth read upon this hallowed advice (well, not really), I would tell you plainly that every day is a new one on a giant slate of slides, and no statewide ranking system by the most zealous of computer programmer can ever really limit your development.
Even though the librarian swore that I would miss school given a few years time, I don’t. The confusion and the angst of a time thus passed, coupled with the domestic life and external and internal pressures of spiritual development, examination performance and social life was enough for any approaching young adult to cope.
Nevertheless, one day I will travel back the irregularly straight margin leading to the gates and come to terms with the stifled fires that yearned to burn here. After petitioning to see drama brought into the curriculum of a maths and science centred syllabus, musical performances, poetry competitions, late night and early morning classes, cyber-culture and a reading-wrought vocabulary that was equal awe and intimidation by peers, it was often only my solitary walks in hurt and confusion that gave me a bird’s eye view on this knitted microcosm of the world. Until such a time, I will grow into the elastic shaping mould of the character and associated values and ideologies, that is I.
-Vale!
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